I totally agree with her supposition about ‘E-mail Marketing’ as a term slowly fading away as we find more and more vehicles to get our messages in front of the customer, consumer or client – the marketing doesn’t change, just the medium in which we do it.

But I think the key point that’s missing is that we need to change the discourse and make our superiors (whether those are bosses or clients) realize that marketing online is a much more holistic medium now and doesn’t just involve ‘an e-mail blast to tweak some sales’ (said to me more often than I care to count – as an aside, I hate the term ‘blast.’ Makes me think my client is Dick Cheney with a shotgun on a hunting trip: dangerous and not good for anyone on the other side of that ‘blast.’).

No, it’s now our responsibility as marketers to make people realize that any marketing content is going to be used across multiple mediums, and that the audience is having more and more control in how they interact with us. That the convergence that was mentioned almost a decade ago as the holy grail of technology and marketing is finally happening today and that our messages will be seen on Facebook, MySpace, Del.icio.us, TiVo, the iPhone, the Android, the billboard, or the internet-enabled car stereo.

We’ve finally entered the age of true, interactive marketing.

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The first reason being that with no email address on the page there is a much smaller chance of getting random spam email from a bott that farmed my email address off the the site.

Now that more and more people are using web based email as there only email, a mailto link is not as practical. As the code is written, it cannot open up a browser and then launch the web mail site you use like it can with a desktop based mail application.

The last reason is with a form that is accessible, usable, and well thought out, the reader can narrow the question and just zip you off a quick note. That is part of what Findability is, giving the readers a well thought out way to complete a task on your site.

So I decided to add the page, and then I got to thinking. I could hand write the HTML / PHP to make the form work and come up with a safety to keep spam out of it, but this is WordPress and we have a community of developers that have written some great plug-ins. So, there must be one for this also.

And there was. After some short searching I came across a plugin on Beast-Blog.com . A great secure and accessible form plugin for WordPress written by Mike Cherim (http://green-beast.com/) and Mike Jolley (http://www.blue-anvil.com/) . If you can install a plug-in on your blog, then you can by all means do the install for this one.

A great install guide is on the site that walks you through the set up once you have uploaded the files to your server. You can even add custom CSS to it if you like. I started with the default style and it looked good in my template. If it does not look the way you want with yours, you can fix it by hand or there is a list of styles that come with it for a whole lot of popular WordPress themes.

So did I make the right choice to not include my email address on the site? Do you like a form or a mailto link? Drop me a coment and let me know what you think.

As always thanks for reading.

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 Spinning Spammers are described as people who are taking posts from real bloggers and then running them through some type of algorithm. This may involve using a thesaurus to find synonyms for the words in questions or an automatic translation program to convert the work into another language and perhaps converting it back to English.

 There is a good explanation of it in this article also on Blog Herald

They then post it on a site, and you get a notice of a track back. If you are good and want to know who is linking to you (and you should), you can go and hand trace the link back to the page it came from. When you get there you will find a post that may kind of look like yours, but at the bottom it has a link that says something like “Go read the rest of the article at:” and it links back to your blog.

So why is this bad? You are getting an incoming link and that is what we all want, right? As the owner of the blog and the post, you did nothing wrong, and there is a good chance that you will see no repercussions from this at all. But there is a small chance that you could get flagged for posting duplicate content or some unkown penalty that Google has yet to come up with.

Besides that, they are stealing the work you have created and that is never good. You took the time to sit down and come up with an idea and write it down. In theory, you also spent time crafting it and changing it until it was just right. All they want is new content to up their AdSense rating and make more money.

How to stop it? Well there are some ways that Jonathan talks about. All of them are good, and I am sure they will work. The one I am trying out is the first one on his list which is the Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress. I have installed it and am running it now, and it looks like it works. You can set your fingerprint to anything you want, and they even give you an option to trace the prints right from your dashboard in WordPress.

 After it has been running a little longer I will give you all an update of how it is working for me. In the mean time what do you all think? Should we be worried about this kind of Spam / Content stealing? Are we wasting time trying to stop them? Let me know in the comments.

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